When a Prayer Becomes Music: The Twenty-Year Journey of Charles-Henri Avelange’s Tribute to Firefighters
- Isabelle Karamooz
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
A monument does not always have to be made of stone. Sometimes it begins with words on the wall of a fire station, encountered by a young French composer in the middle of the night. Nearly twenty years later, those words have grown into an ambitious symphonic work involving a 90-piece Hollywood orchestra, internationally recognized choral forces, children’s voices and the unmistakable sound of firefighter bagpipes. But to understand what Charles-Henri Avelange is attempting with The Fireman’s Prayer, it helps to look beyond the impressive scale of the recording. He is trying to create something more difficult than a tribute: music capable of carrying remembrance from one generation of firefighters to another.
The work is inspired by the Fireman’s Prayer, written in 1958 by A.W. “Smokey” Linn. Avelange encountered it decades later, after arriving in the United States from France and forming an unexpected bond with firefighters in Washington State. He had come to America in 2005 with little money, imperfect spoken English and considerable ambition. “I had $500 in my pockets, a dream, and then a suitcase,” he remembers. Born in Fréjus-Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d’Azur and raised in a military family, Avelange had trained in sound engineering and developed largely outside the traditional conservatory system. America represented possibility. What he did not expect was that firefighters would become among the first Americans to make him feel at home. “They were immediately very, very warm,” he recalls. “They were very happy to meet a Frenchman.” Those early friendships eventually led to Age of Heroes, his musical tribute to firefighters, veterans and members of the military, which became a fundraiser for the Washington State Council of Firefighters.
In 2006, while attending the Council’s annual convention, Avelange was invited to spend 24 hours with a fire crew. During that shift, he witnessed the aftermath of a serious multi-vehicle accident on Interstate 5. He watched firefighters working among wrecked vehicles and saw injured victims evacuated. Back at the station, sometime after one in the morning, someone showed him The Fireman’s Prayer. Avelange read the words; and heard music. “I looked at them and said, ‘Are you sure it’s not music already?’” he recalls. They explained that it was a poem, a prayer known within the firefighting community. Avelange heard something else. “I said, ‘No, it’s not just a poem. It’s an anthem.’ And then I started singing.” He describes the experience not as the painstaking construction of a melody but almost as an act of discovery: “I heard it as if it already existed in my head.”
Then came something stranger. He heard bagpipes. Avelange did not yet know the instrument’s deep ceremonial connection to American firefighters, particularly through the Irish and Scottish traditions embedded in fire-service culture. He simply felt that the composition needed them. “I’ve always been a bit of a free spirit,” he says. His reasoning at the time was almost mischievous: “Nobody does it. I’m going to do it.” When firefighters heard his early realization of the piece, some became emotional. “They look at me and say, ‘But how did you know?’” Avelange did not understand. They explained what the pipes meant to them. “I didn’t know,” he replied. “I thought it would be cool.” It is an amusing story until one considers where those same pipes are so often heard: ceremonies, memorials and funerals. What Avelange had introduced instinctively eventually became one of the elements connecting his composition most directly to the culture he wanted to honor. “It’s the music that literally told me,” he says. “In a certain way, music always tells me what to do.”
The composition itself came rapidly. Giving it the sound Avelange believed it deserved would take almost two decades. He could have reduced the forces, lowered the production ambitions or recorded it more cheaply. He chose not to. “I’ve always been very, very demanding with this music in particular,” he explains, “because for me, the firefighters being people of exceptional quality, I only wanted musicians of exceptional quality to play it.” That decision transformed The Fireman’s Prayer from a composition into a long-term undertaking. Avelange imagined a full orchestra, major choir and professional recording environment. For years, the resources required to realize that vision remained beyond reach. Yet the piece never disappeared. “What’s funny is that people are getting ready to discover it,” he says. “But for me, it’s been 20 years since I’ve known it. It’s been 20 years since I’ve sung it in my head.”
Then, in 2026, what had existed largely inside the composer’s imagination began acquiring other voices. Recording sessions with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Children’s Chorus were followed by a major orchestral session at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. On the legendary Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage, Grant Gershon, Artistic Director of the Grammy Award-winning Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted the 90-piece Hollywood Scoring Orchestra. Fire-service representatives, nonprofit leaders and supporters were present, bringing the community being portrayed by the music directly into the room where it was being created. For Avelange, however, one of the most profound moments occurred when the human voice entered the work. For years he had lived with a sophisticated digital realization of the composition, but a computer simulation could not reproduce what happens when singers breathe together and give language physical form. “When I heard the choir sing the words with my music on it for the first time,” he recalls, “instantly I cried. It was uncontrollable.”
That reaction says something important about the evolution of The Fireman’s Prayer. For twenty years, the composition had belonged primarily to its composer. The moment other human beings began singing it, it started becoming something else. And increasingly, firefighters themselves are entering the music. Among those involved with or supporting the project have been Deputy Chief Lawrence Collins of Cal OES, John Stockman of the IAFF 7th District Benevolent Fund, Pete Martinez of the LA County Fire Museum and Jeff Hahn of the California Professional Firefighters Pipes & Drums Corps. Collins has described the work as “much more than a musical composition,” emphasizing its recognition of firefighters’ commitment and sacrifice. Stockman identified another dimension: “Music has a unique ability to preserve memories and unite people.” That idea, preserving memory, may ultimately be more important than the scale of the orchestra.
Avelange has also learned that the pipes-and-drums musicians involved in firefighter culture are not ceremonial performers detached from the realities the music describes. They are firefighters who can be called upon when colleagues die. At one point, preparations connected with his project had to wait. “Charles, we wanted to work on your music this weekend, but we couldn’t because we lost two of ours,” Avelange remembers being told. “And we had to go play at their funeral.” “Since I have been in contact with the firefighters, I see their reality,” he says. That reality gives the grandeur of The Fireman’s Prayer its necessary counterweight. Ninety musicians can create enormous sound. A choir can make a scoring stage tremble. Bagpipes can carry across a landscape. But the subject underneath all of it remains intimate: someone leaves home for a shift without knowing what the next call will require, while someone else waits for that person to return.
Interviews - Charles-Henri Avelange et Deputy Chief Lawrence Collins
Interview #1
Interview #2
The Fireman's Prayer: Choral Recording Session BTS: Watch the Video HERE
The project acquired still greater immediacy after the devastating Los Angeles wildfires. Avelange and his wife were living only streets from an evacuation area. Suddenly, the firefighters he had spent years honoring were protecting communities around him. The orchestral recording subsequently brought together musicians and members of California’s firefighting community in what the project described as a moment of “remembrance, gratitude, and hope” following those fires. For Avelange, the timing changed the conversation. People no longer needed him to explain why the project mattered. One reaction affected him particularly. Collins told him, “When I listen to this, it reminds me of why we do what we do.” It is difficult to imagine a more consequential response for a composer writing about a world he respects but does not pretend to inhabit himself.
Avelange also insists that the project should produce something tangible beyond the recording. Following completion, 100 percent of his proceeds as composer are intended to be donated to nonprofit organizations supporting firefighters and their families. “The purpose of this music is the greatest thank you that we can say to the firefighters for what they do for their community,” he says. “We depend on their courage, their lives, their sacrifices, everything they do to save lives.” And although The Fireman’s Prayer grew from Avelange’s encounter with American firefighters, he resists defining the finished work as exclusively American. The French-American composer calls it “really universal.” Firefighters in different countries may have different uniforms, institutions and traditions, but the essential act is recognizable everywhere: moving toward danger on behalf of strangers.
Perhaps this is where the twenty-year wait becomes meaningful rather than merely extraordinary. Had Avelange released the composition quickly after first encountering the prayer, it would have been one man’s musical tribute. Over time, firefighters entered the story. Their families entered it. Choirs and orchestral musicians entered it. Pipes and drums entered it. Wildfires changed its context. Loss gave some of its ceremonial sounds a more painful meaning. The composition accumulated lives around itself. And that may be the more interesting definition of a memorial: not simply something created to tell us whom to remember, but a place, physical or artistic, where other people can bring their own memories.
Avelange hopes The Fireman’s Prayer can eventually become precisely that. He remembers Lawrence Collins speaking about music giving the words “a dimension without borders and timeless.” “That’s my biggest dream for this music,” Avelange says. “If it could only do that, my mission is accomplished.”
Twenty years after a French composer encountered a prayer on the wall of an American fire station, perhaps the most important thing about The Fireman’s Prayer is no longer how long it took to make. It is who it belongs to now.
Supporting The Fireman’s Prayer
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Those wishing to support The Fireman’s Prayer and help expand the reach of the tribute to America’s firefighters can do so through the Los Angeles County Fire Museum’s project page, where the initiative is being supported and promoted.
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